to help us to understand and deconstruct capitalism in order to create a sustainable and peaceful social system.

We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Tuesday, June 6, 2017

Getting Julian Assange: The Untold Story

For almost seven years, this epic miscarriage of justice has been drowned in a vituperative campaign against the WikiLeaks founder. There are few precedents. Deeply personal, petty, vicious and inhuman attacks have been aimed at a man not charged with any crime yet subjected to treatment not even meted out to a defendant facing extradition on a charge of murdering his wife. That the U.S. threat to Assange was a threat to all journalists, and to the principle of free speech, was lost in the sordid and the ambitious. I would call it anti-journalism.

This vendetta against Julian Assange, along with their treatment of Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden, illustrates the extreme importance that Empire directors place on preventing any information that exposes their many criminal activities. But this is only part of the story.

Corporate media, which capitalists own and control, have been used to purvey a countless number of fake news reports, self-serving propaganda, and poorly done investigative reports of "terrorist" incidents. The two together, that is, the persecution of alternative sources of information together with their propaganda use of corporate media indicate that the ruling class directors of the capitalist Empire regard the monopoly of information as a top priority to prevent their subjects from interfering in their plans of world hegemony and extracting the last ounce of wealth from the Earth.